Jack O'Connell in 'Ink' Studiocanal Danny Boyle‘s Ink, a drama about Rupert Murdoch’s rise to media power in the world of the U.K. tabloids, will open this year’s Venice Film Festival.
Ink will have its world premiere in competition in Venice, opening the 83rd festival on Sept. 2.
Guy Pearce stars as Murdoch in the biographical drama, from playwright James Graham, who adapted his Tony-nominated play of the same name for the screen. Jack O’Connell (Sinners) plays Larry Lamb, hired by Murdoch to run his new British tabloid The Sun and transform it into a dark force in British media. Claire Foy plays Jules Davies.
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This will mark Boyle’s first time on the Lido. “This is my baptism at the film festival,” Boyle said, calling it “a huge honor to be in a city of such extraordinary art and opening this great festival with my new film.”
Ink is set in 1969, the year Murdoch and Lamb launched The Sun, a paper that, with it far-right political reporting and populist rabble rousing, became hugely successful and set the template for new media era.
“Long before Fox News, click bait, and Truth Social; decades before Twitter, Facebook, Google & Only Fans, these 2 men created a new tabloid which against all the odds became the biggest selling newspaper in the world,” said Boyle. “Cheeky, irreverent, daring: The super soaraway Sun challenged the establishment and remade our world for the modern era.”
Venice artistic director Alberto Barberan praised the collaboration in Ink of “an Oscar-winning director, one of the leading playwrights on the London theater scene, and three of the most acclaimed actors in contemporary British cinema.”
Boyle produced the film with Tessa Ross, his producer on the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire, and Tracey Seaward (The Two Popes, Philomena). The film was produced by Studiocanal, Media Res and House Productions, with Anna Marsh, Ron Halpern, Joe Naftalin executive producers for Studiocanal.
Studiocanal is handling worldwide sales, and is co-representing domestic with WME Independent. Studiocanal will also directly handle the theatrical release of the film across several of their operating territories, including the U.K., France, Germany, Poland, Australia and New Zealand.
The 2026 Venice Film Festival runs Sept. 2-12. Venice will announce its full 2026 lineup on July 23.
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